Commonwealth v. West’s Empirical Analysis
1942
Citation profile
12 federal appellate · 72 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 86 later decisions — most recently December 2018 · most notably State v. Piskorski (1979), United States v. Barrett (1976)
12 federal appellate · 72 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Commonwealth v. Smith · Commonwealth v. Homer · Commonwealth v. Mercier · Robinson v. Old Colony Street Railway Co. · Langan v. Pianowski
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 86 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“It is enough if the proffered [statement] taken as a whole, either by what it says or by what it omits to say, affords some indication that the fact was different from the testimony of the witness whom it is sought to contradict.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage“[I]t is also well settled as a rule of evidence that if a witness, upon either direct or cross-examination, testifies to a fact that is relevant to the issue on trial, the adverse party, for the purpose of impeaching his testimony, may show that the witness has made previous inconsistent or conflicting statements either by eliciting such statements upon cross-examination of the witness himself, or by proving them by other witnesses.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.